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Thursday, 3 May 2012

As of yesterday Virgin Media customers were no longer able to reach the standard domain address for the Pirate Bay (thepiratebay.se/) after an earlier high court ruling demanded that the UK's biggest ISPs block access to the site on the grounds that it breaches copyright laws. This move has brought with it criticisms from several internet advocacy groups.

Speaking over at guardian.co.uk Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, said:

Blocking The Pirate Bay is pointless and dangerous. It will fuel calls for further, wider and even more drastic calls for Internet censorship of many kinds, from pornography to extremism ... Internet censorship is growing in scope and becoming easier. Yet it never has the effect desired. It simply turns criminals into heroes.

Part of the problem is that in an attempt to block access to copyrighted material, Virgin Media have also cut off access to the Pirate Bay blog - leading to a rather chilling effect on free speech.

It seems like the block has had an inverse effect as TorrentFreak carried a report in which the Pirate Bay stated they witnessed a surge in traffic to the site - after the block came into effect. Traffic levels saw a spike totalling an extra 12 million visitors as web users came to see what the fuss was about (a classic case of the Streisland Effect).

Access to the site can still be achieved if web users are committed enough to seek out alternate ways to reach The Pirate Bay. The UK arm of the Pirate Party have a proxy server setup to help people bypass the rather clumsy attempt at enforcing domain level censorship. How long this link stays available remains to be seen.

Over on the Pirate Bay's blog is an overview of the different ways in which users can still access the site:

As usual there are easy ways to circumvent the block. Use a VPN service to be anonymous and get an uncensored internet access, you should do this anyhow. Or use TOR, I2P or some other darknet with access to the internets. Change your DNS settings with OpenDNS. Or use googles DNS servers... we could go on...

There are a range of different VPN services - some free, some expensive - that provide web users with alternate ways to route around censorship. The very real danger in the future lies with the potential misuse of domain level blocking. The Pirate Bay has been blocked as a consequence of successful lobbying by the entertainment industry (due to hosting links to files that may violate various copyright claims), but as the web becomes more and more a commodified experience, one wonders how long it will be before censorship of domains occurs at the expense of websites that carry material other powerful lobbyists disagree with

In the mean time, the blocking doesn't matter. The video below shows one way round the block. However, the future of the Internet doesn't look quite so open today.